Author Archives: News Sources

Israel’s draconian system of arrest and detention

Sandy Tolan writes: Imagine being confined to a small sliver of land, in plain view of a wider homeland that you cannot touch. Your house is in a refugee camp, surrounded by fine red-roofed homes built by and for strangers who seized your territory without warning or permission.

The strangers, perched on hills that make it possible for them to spy into your home, are protected by one of the world’s most powerful armies, with its tanks, rockets and helicopter gunships supplied by the top military power on earth. The soldiers tightly restrict your movements through your own territory.

They subject your family to random searches at military posts along the road, where you are forced to submit your documents and sometimes to strip down to your underwear. At night, without warning, the army may enter your home and take your teen-aged children. In fact, they often do.

Once you finally find out where they are, they may or may not face any charges. If they are not charged, the military courts can hold them there indefinitely. If they are, the chances they will be found innocent are 1 in 400.

Imagine that you lived in such place, in a land you had long dreamt would be your own sovereign country, but which is now cut up into tiny enclaves that keep you thus confined. What would you do?

If you chose to resist, how would you do so?

Oday Khatib fought back by singing. Unlike many of the boys and young men in Al-Fawwar, the Palestinian refugee camp near Hebron, who fought occupation by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, Oday, the internationally-recognised singer of the acclaimed Ramallah-based Al Kamandjati music school, has long found his resistance in Palestinian protest songs.

“He is not interested in throwing stones or getting involved in this,” Oday’s father, Jihad, said in an interview with my colleague Anan Abu-Shanab. Oday’s brothers have long hurled stones, but “since he was nine years old he was interested only in music”.

Nevertheless, Oday was arrested on March 19 under questionable circumstances at Al-Fawwar refugee camp.

His family says Oday was standing on hill, waiting to meet a friend. Nearby, his father said, children were throwing stones, “and when the soldiers chased the kids, it did not come to his mind that the soldiers would go for him. Otherwise he would have run away”.

The Israeli military spokesman asserts that Oday was arrested “after security forces identified him engaged in rock throwing during the course of a violent riot”. (“Violent riot” is a curious description for a clash between well-armed soldiers wearing chest protectors, helmets and face shields, who fire live ammunition at stone-throwers.)

Oday is charged under Section 212 of Military Order 1651, which states that anyone convicted of throwing stones “[a]t a person or property, with the intent to harm the person or property shall be sentenced to ten years imprisonment”. In other words, the law is so sweeping that if you throw a rock at a road sign, you could go to prison for a decade. Oday’s trial is scheduled for Monday, April 8. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s massive rape crisis

Lauren Wolfe writes: One day in the fall of 2012, Syrian government troops brought a young Free Syrian Army soldier’s fiancée, sisters, mother, and female neighbors to the Syrian prison in which he was being held. One by one, he said, they were raped in front of him.

The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent.

Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war, like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are creating a nation of traumatized survivors — everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives. [Continue reading…]

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Vali Nasr dissects Obama’s foreign policy failings

Robert E. Hunter writes: Publication this month of Vali Nasr’s The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, could not have been better timed. The US and the NATO allies are in the process of disengaging from Afghanistan — however they choose to describe the process — without first developing clarity about what comes next and how to understand or secure the West’s continuing interests there or in the region. The Syrian civil war continues, seemingly without end and without success so far in the US government to develop a coherent policy or, apparently, efforts to fit that conflagration within developments in the region as a whole. President Obama has just visited the Near East, but there is as yet no promise that serious negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians will begin anytime soon. The standoff with Iran and its nuclear program continues. And there are widespread doubts about the staying-power of US commitments and policies throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia. For some observers, including Nasr, all this leads to serious questioning about the overall conduct of American foreign policy, summarized in his judgment: “retreat.”

The author, now Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, has had a special vantage point. From January 2009 until 2011 Nasr was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (who died in December 2010), who was the President’s (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s) Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan — shortened to the more digestible “AfPak.” It is not too much to say that Dr. Nasr’s brief but intense experience in the US government at a high level was both disappointing and disillusioning — and he was not alone. His principal conclusion, at least as inferred by this reviewer, is that the Obama White House failed to take seriously the diplomatic opportunities that were afforded the US, not just toward AfPak, but in the region overall; that it continued to tolerate an excessive militarization of US policies begun by earlier administrations at the expense of a more integrated approach where diplomatic instruments could play their proper role; that the president himself was long on language — eloquently so — but short on action and in the process failed to come to grips with a number of regional developments; that the best efforts by the State Department, including by Secretary Clinton, to intervene in critical policy-making were too often either rebuffed or ignored; and that the US has failed in its essential leadership role. Indeed, the title of Nasr’s book, Dispensable Nation, is a play on a term first coined by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the effect that the US in the post-Cold War world remains the “indispensable nation.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran nuclear talks reveal gulf between sides

Laura Rozen reports: Iran and six world powers remained far apart at the conclusion of two days of talks here without agreeing to meet again, but American and European diplomats said the Iranians had engaged more deeply than ever before on the details of a potential nuclear compromise.

“Two days of talks just concluded that were indeed quite substantive,” a senior US official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists at the conclusion of talks Saturday. “Each session involved a robust discussion….[that were] more natural and free-flowing than past talks.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” the US diplomat said. “There was intensive dialogue on key issues at the core of [the proposed confidence building measure.]. Both sides came away with better understanding of each others’ positions.” [Continue reading…]

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How do you ask a jihadist to be the last jihadist to die in Afghanistan?

Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau report: As the spring weather warms and the snow melts off the high mountain passes separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban fighters who spent the winter in Afghan refugee camps and other safe havens inside Pakistan are preparing to return to battle. But this year some insurgents are having second thoughts about fighting in Afghanistan at a time when it appears that peace talks between the US and the Taliban are about to resume in Qatar after a year’s hiatus.

Indeed, there are heated debates raging among the fighters as to the wisdom of returning to fight and perhaps die as peace prospects are being discussed. “The leadership hopes to dispatch a big number of fighters to Afghanistan this year,” says Zabihullah, a senior Taliban operative whose information has proved reliable in the past. “But now there is great confusion among the fighters whether to go and fight or stay behind in Pakistan and await the results of the Qatar peace talks.”

In a mosque made of mud-bricks in the middle of the Haripur Afghan refugee camp, some 40 miles north of Islamabad, five Taliban fighters are relaxing, enjoying the warm spring weather, and sipping green tea from discolored tea cups. “Take advantage of the rest and the sunshine because in less than one month we have to return to the jihad,” says Mullah Mohammad Khan, 30, the senior fighter among the group. But his comrade-in-arms, Mohidain Akhund, does not share Khan’s enthusiasm. “This year my heart really does not want to go back to the jihad,” Akhund tells Khan frankly. “Our leaders are talking to the kafirs in Qatar and then asking us to return to Afghanistan to resist the Americans. Allah, pardon me, but I cannot make up my mind whether or not to go to the jihad this year.”

Khan, a sub-commander from northern Baghlan province, tries to argue with Akhund, warning him that he’s in danger of losing his faith. “These are satanic temptations,” he says. “If you say no to the jihad then how will you answer to Allah on Judgment Day?” Akhund is still not convinced. “I am proud to have been in the jihad for the past five years in Helmand [Province] and to have lost a brother and a nephew,” he tells Khan. “But how can I continue fighting when our leaders are enjoying the Americans’ hospitality in Qatar and we’re told we have to kill Afghan soldiers?” Another fighter named Abdullah pipes up, agreeing with Akhund, saying he is also confused about what to do this year. “Our leaders are enjoying air conditioned rooms, driving luxury cars and living in good houses while we live a troubled life fighting in Afghanistan,” says Abdullah. Khan still tries to cajole them. “We do not perform jihad for this or that personality,” he says. “We offer our sweet breath for Allah and we should expect rewards from Allah, not the leaders who are human and far from perfect.” [Continue reading…]

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Despair among the victims of injustice at Guantánamo

New York Times editorial: The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantánamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part.

The number matters less than the nature of the protest, however: this is a collective act of despair. Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three prisoners now at Guantánamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released.

Detainees there have gone on hunger strikes many times since the facility opened in 2002. A major strike in 2005 involved more than 200 detainees. But those earlier actions were largely about the brutality of treatment the detainees received. The protest this time seems more fundamental. Gen. John Kelly of the Marines, whose Southern Command oversees Guantánamo Bay, explained the motivation of the detainees at a Congressional hearing last month by saying, “They had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed” based on President Obama’s pledge in his first campaign, but they are now “devastated” that nothing has changed.

For 86 detainees, this is a particular outrage. They were approved for release three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military agencies responsible for national security.

But Congress outrageously has limited the president’s options in releasing them, through a statute that makes it very difficult to use federal money to transfer Guantánamo prisoners anywhere. Fifty-six of those approved for release are Yemenis. The government, however, has said it will not release them to Yemen for the “foreseeable future,” apparently because they might fall under the influence of people antagonistic to the United States. That false logic would mean that no Yemenis could ever travel to this country, but that is not the case.

The other 30 detainees approved for release are from different countries, though the government will not say where they are from. Over the past decade, the government has sent detainees to at least 52 countries, The Times and NPR have determined, so it surely can find countries to take detainees who cannot be returned home.

As for the remaining 80 prisoners, the three who have been convicted and the 30 or so who are subjects of active cases or investigations can be transferred to a military or civilian prison. The rest are in indefinite detention — a legal limbo in which they are considered by the government to be too dangerous to release and too difficult to prosecute. Such detention is the essence of what has been wrong with Guantánamo from the start. The cases of these detainees must be reviewed and resolved according to the rule of law.

The government is force-feeding at least 10 of the hunger strikers. International agreements among doctors say doctors must respect a striker’s decision if he makes “an informed and voluntary refusal” to eat. But under American policy, Guantánamo doctors cannot adhere to those principles. The Obama administration justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their safety and welfare. But the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantánamo.

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Ban pesticides linked to bee deaths, say British MPs

BBC News reports: The UK government should suspend the use of a number of pesticides linked to the deaths of bees, a committee of MPs has said.

Members of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee are calling for a moratorium on the use of sprays containing neonicotinoids.

Britain has refused to back an EU ban on these chemicals saying their impact on bees is unclear.

But MPs say this is an “extraordinarily complacent” approach.

Wild species such as honey bees are said by researchers to be responsible for pollinating around one-third of the world’s crop production.

In their report, MPs say that two-thirds of these species have suffered population declines in the UK.

They argue that a “growing body of peer-reviewed research” points the finger at a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. [Continue reading…]

On March 28, Agri-View reported: Last week, a year after groups formally petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), four beekeepers and five environmental and consumer groups filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court against the agency for its failure to protect pollinators from pesticides. The coalition, represented by attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS), seeks suspension of the registrations of insecticides that have repeatedly been identified as highly toxic to honey bees, clear causes of major bee kills and significant contributors to the devastating ongoing mortality of bees known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). The suit challenges EPA’s ongoing handling of the pesticides as well as the agency’s practice of “conditional registration” and labeling deficiencies.

“America’s beekeepers cannot survive for long with the toxic environment EPA has supported. Bee-toxic pesticides in dozens of widely used products, on top of many other stresses our industry faces, are killing our bees and threatening our livelihoods,” said plaintiff Steve Ellis, a Minnesota and California beekeeper. “Our country depends on bees for crop pollination and honey production. It’s time for EPA to recognize the value of bees to our food system and agricultural economy.”

On March 29, The Guardian reported: Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar.

These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants.

The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations.

It has also been revealed that a separate government field study on the impact of the pesticides on bees was seriously compromised by contamination because the chemicals are so widespread in the environment.

The government put the field study at the heart of the UK’s resistance to a Europe-wide ban on the controversial pesticides earlier this month. The UK was one of nine out of 27 member states that opposed suspending some uses of the insecticides across the EU, after environment secretary Owen Paterson said, “I have asked the EC to wait for the results of our field trials, rather than rushing to a decision”. On Wednesday, his department said more field research was needed.

The new findings on the effect of pesticides on bee brains showed that within 20 minutes of exposure to neonicotinoids the neurons in the major learning centre of the brain stopped firing. Christopher Connolly at the University of Dundee, who led the peer-reviewed work published in the online journal Nature Communications, said it was the first to show the pesticides had a direct impact on pollinator brain physiology.

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GMOs don’t merit protection

Mark Bittman writes: Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it. Excluding, of course, those who’ve made money from it, appropriately represented in the public’s mind by Monsanto. That corporation, or at least its friends, recently managed to have an outrageous rider slipped into the 587-page funding bill Congress sent to President Obama.

The rider essentially prohibits the Department of Agriculture from stopping production of any genetically engineered crop once it’s in the ground, even if there is evidence that it is harmful.

That’s a pre-emptive Congressional override of the judicial system, since it is the courts that are most likely to ask the U.S.D.A. to halt planting or harvest of a particular crop. President Obama signed the bill last week (he kind of had to, to prevent a government shutdown) without mentioning the offensive rider (he might have), despite the gathering of more than 250,000 signatures protesting the rider by the organization Food Democracy Now!

The override is unnecessary as well as disgraceful, because the U.S.D.A. is already overly supportive of genetically engineered crops. When a court tried to stop the planting of genetically engineered beets a couple of years ago pending adequate study, the U.S.D.A. allowed it. And the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack – who, in fairness, does not seem happy about the rider but was powerless to stop it – was quoted in this (excellent) Politico piece as saying, “With the seed genetics today that we’re seeing, miracles are occurring every single growing season.”

True enough. But “seed genetics” refers not only to genetically engineered seeds but to seeds whose genetics have been altered by conventional means, like classical breeding. In fact, as I said up top, genetic engineering, or, more properly, transgenic engineering – in which a gene, usually from another species of plant, bacterium or animal, is inserted into a plant in the hope of positively changing its nature – has been disappointing.

In the nearly 20 years of applied use of G.E. in agriculture there have been two notable “successes,” along with a few less notable ones. These are crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide (Monsanto develops both the seeds and the herbicide to which they’re resistant) and crops that contain their own insecticide. The first have already failed, as so-called superweeds have developed resistance to Roundup, and the second are showing signs of failing, as insects are able to develop resistance to the inserted Bt toxin — originally a bacterial toxin — faster than new crop variations can be generated.

Nothing else in the world of agricultural genetic engineering even comes close to the “success” of these two not-entirely-successful creations. Furthermore, at least in these cases, their pattern of success (and high profits) followed by failure was inevitable.

Don’t take my word for it. Let me summarize extensive conversations I’ve recently had with Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist and plant pathologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists: Roundup Ready seeds allowed farmers to spend less time and energy controlling weeds. But the temporary nature of the gains was predictable: “There was no better way to create weeds tolerant to glyphosate (Roundup) than to spray all of them intensively for a few years,” Gurian-Sherman told me. “And that’s what was done.”

The result is that the biggest crisis in monocrop agriculture – something like 90 percent of all soybeans and 70 percent of corn is grown using Roundup Ready seed – lies in glyphosate’s inability to any longer provide total or even predictable control, because around a dozen weed species have developed resistance to it. “Any ecologist would have predicted this, and many did,” Gurian-Sherman said. [Continue reading…]

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Diversity programs fabricate the appearance of corporate fairness

Science Daily: Diversity training programs lead people to believe that work environments are fair even when given evidence of hiring, promotion or salary inequities, according to new findings by psychologists at the University of Washington and other universities.

The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs.

Workplace diversity programs are usually developed by human resource departments to foster a more inclusive environment for employees, but aren’t typically tested for their effectiveness. Nonetheless, their existence has been used in courtrooms as evidence that companies treat employees fairly.

“Our fear is that companies may prematurely stop thinking about diversity among their workers because they’ve credentialed themselves with these programs,” said Cheryl Kaiser, lead author and a UW associate professor of psychology. “Our findings suggest that diversity programs can be window dressing — even those that do very little to increase diversity may still be perceived as effective.”

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France wants to keep 1,000 soldiers in Mali permanently

Reuters reports: France has proposed keeping a permanent force of 1,000 French troops in Mali to fight armed Islamist militants, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday.

Fabius, on a visit to Bamako, said France was pushing ahead with plans to reduce its 4,000-strong military presence from the end of this month but planned to keep a combat force in Mali to support a future U.N. peacekeeping mission.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called last week for the deployment of a U.N. mission of 11,200 troops and 1,440 police in Mali once major combat ends.

This would include thousands of African troops already in Mali in support of France’s three-month military campaign, which has swept Islamist rebels out of the towns of northern Mali and into remote desert and mountain hideaways.

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Kim Jong-un’s goal is simply survival

The Guardian reports: At the end of a week in which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un shattered the illusion that his rule would mark a departure from bellicosity, signs are emerging that there may be method in his apparent madness.

His motivation is not war, but simple regime survival, top-level defectors in the South have told the Guardian. And he wants his future, says one of the regime’s former fundraisers, to be guaranteed by largesse from the same country the North recently threatened with nuclear annihilation: the US.

The 20,000 North Koreans who have made new lives in the South since the end of the Korean war in 1953 are among the few people placed to give reliable insights into a country that often generates more speculative heat thananalytical light.

While they are divided on how far Kim will to go in his campaign to pressure the US and South Korea into offering talks on aid and a peace treaty, they say he is as aware as officials in Washington and Seoul that all-out war and the continuation of his dynasty are mutually exclusive.

“Kim Jong-un’s aim is to unite the North Korean military and people around his regime and win their trust,” said Jang Se-yul, a former mathematics professor who spent 10 years in the cyberwarfare unit of the North Korean army in Pyongyang. “They don’t trust Kim yet, and they’re looking for strong signals from him.”

Jang, who says he talks “two or three times a day” to North Korean workers, soldiers and high-ranking government officials near the Chinese border, where they can receive a mobile phone signal, did not know if Kim’s attempts to endear himself to his people would include military action.

The coming weeks could see more attempts to unsettle the region. Among the options open to Kim are a missile test to mark the 101st anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, or an attack on islands near the disputed North-South maritime border.

What is certain is that the 30-year-old leader will never abandon the North’s nuclear programme, Jang said: “He is like his father [Kim Jong-il], in that he is threatening the US until he wins a concession and can claim he has orchestrated a victory over the enemy. That is exactly what Kim Jong-un is expecting. He knows he’s causing trouble internationally, but if he steps back, he will never win the trust of his people.

“I witnessed huge celebrations after the regime conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Now it won’t let go of the fantasy that having nuclear weapons will make it invincible.”

A credible nuclear deterrent is the first step towards extracting aid and other concessions from the US and repairing the damage UN sanctions have inflicted on an already fragile economy. [Continue reading…]

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Embassies staying put in North Korea despite tension

Reuters reports: Staff at embassies in North Korea appeared to be remaining in place on Saturday despite an appeal by authorities in Pyongyang for diplomats to consider leaving because of heightened tension after weeks of bellicose exchanges.

North Korean authorities told diplomatic missions they could not guarantee their safety from next Wednesday – after declaring that conflict was inevitable amid joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises due to last until the end of the month.

Whatever the atmosphere in Pyongyang, the rain-soaked South Korean capital, Seoul, was calm. Traffic moved normally through the city centre, busy with Saturday shoppers.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted a government official as saying diplomats were disregarding the suggestion they might leave the country.

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Ghazi Hamad: Hamas agrees to accept state within ’67 borders

Al-Monitor: Dr. Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister in the Hamas government, is thought to be one of the people spearheading the movement’s pragmatic wing. Two years ago, the secret channel of communication he maintained with Dr. Gershon Baskin led to a breakthrough in the protracted negotiations over the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. There can be no doubt that the results of these negotiations earned Hamad a position of honor within the Hamas movement and, more broadly, among the Palestinian public.

Hamad is considered to be very close to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whom he once served as spokesman, and to the chief of Hamas’ political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, the movement’s newly reelected leader.

In an exclusive interview with Al-Monitor, Hamad analyzes the next steps that his movement will take, now that Khaled Meshaal has been reelected to head its reconstituted political bureau, and following the change within the movement’s bureau .

Al Monitor: Does Meshaal’s election signify a change in Hamas’ attitudes?

Hamad: First of all, we must remember that these were democratic elections, and as such, they are a credit to the movement. Elections for Hamas’ other institutions ended a year ago, and that was the last time that the Hamas movement expressed confidence in its leaders and their proposal to institute changes to Hamas’ policy. This included reconciliation with Fatah, among other things.

Al Monitor: When you talk about new policy, do you mean an end to the armed struggle and a transition to what Meshaal calls a “popular uprising”?

Hamad: As leader of the movement, Khaled Meshaal agreed to shift to a popular uprising. All of that began during the reconciliation talks. It emerged from a comprehensive vision of the movement’s future and the type of leadership that the Palestinian people need. And yet, though Meshaal is prepared to make a tactical shift to a popular uprising, armed struggle remains a legitimate right as long as the Occupation continues. At the same time, there is an extensive political and diplomatic program which we must advocate and work toward, and that includes joining the official institutions of the PLO. Those are our objectives, and that is our new approach.

Al Monitor: Does that include agreement to go back to the 1967 borders?

Hamad: Hamas has stated that it is prepared to accept a state within the 1967 borders.

Al Monitor: A two-state solution?

Hamad: We do not say “two states.” We agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, within the 1967 borders, and that this would include a solution to the refugee problem. What I can tell you is that all factions in the movement agree to this and are prepared to accept it. [Continue reading…]

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How Israel helped apartheid South Africa build nuclear weapons

Derek Leebaert writes: There have been rumors since the late 1970s of Israeli cooperation in South Africa’s effort to become a nuclear power. A double flash over the Indian Ocean detected by a U.S. satellite in 1979, for example, was suspected (but never confirmed) to be a joint, low-yield Israeli-South African nuclear test.

South African documents that appeared to show Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons were refuted by Israeli President Shimon Peres, in 2010, as “selective interpretation.” Here we show what really occurred — and how.

According to new CIA evidence, Israel proved “absolutely vital” to South Africa’s apartheid regime 30 years ago in building six Hiroshima-size bombs. New details about this collaboration arose in a series of interviews I conducted with Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of CIA covert operations in Europe and, at the time of the events described here, a clandestine officer serving in Pretoria, South Africa. The interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., in 2010.

Drumheller is an unusually credible and outspoken man. In his book, On the Brink: An Insider’s Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence and in interviews with the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” he was the most senior of former CIA officials to tell the truth about faulty intelligence in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He showed how the Bush-Cheney White House had promoted intelligence it liked on Iraq — and specifically on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction — while ignoring intelligence it didn’t like.

Having begun his career in the unusually risky role of “NOC” (non-official cover) in Asia, Drumheller’s operational abilities remain legendary within the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

During our interviews, he reflected on earlier experiences in his career. In 1980, “we had 11 case officers in South Africa, four of them with deep cover.” They had penetrated the apartheid regime’s “Project Circle,” which was already within reach of perfecting a usable, deliverable atomic bomb.

“We were regularly able to obtain swipe samples from its enrichment facilities. We could monitor progress,” Drumheller told me.

They also monitored the deep cover “black station” of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. Drumheller said this was a front company called TamCo. The Israelis had no idea they were under such close U.S. scrutiny.

Washington had tried to impede Pretoria’s effort by embargoing the shipment of a VAX computer from Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corporation. “Project Circle needed that VAX” to complete the project, Drumheller said.

The CIA station in Pretoria learned that South Africa was able to get around the embargo by having the computer — the same powerful VAX model — transshipped from the United States. “It came via the Israelis and TamCo,” Drumheller said.

Israel contributed another vital piece to Project Circle’s success by supplying the tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is manufactured in nuclear reactors, for the bombs’ triggering mechanisms. In addition, Israel provided Pretoria with an essential avionics package that would allow the bombs to be dropped by South African Air Force jets.

The CIA was able to obtain these and other details about the Israeli-South African collusion, Drumheller explained, from a stellar agent that the CIA had placed within Project Circle.

The CIA station in Pretoria was tracking full-scale government-to-government collaboration that was taking place despite a UN Security Council resolution that had imposed a mandatory arms embargo against the white supremacist state in 1977.

Washington, meanwhile, had enough on its hands with Israel during this period. Strains in relations included Israel’s 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee invasion of Lebanon. The extent of the invasion’s civilian carnage led President Ronald Reagan (choosing his words carefully, as is known from his diary) to denounce the bombing and shelling of civilians to Israel’s prime minister as “a holocaust.”

In any event, Pretoria finally took it upon itself to dismantle its jointly developed bombs in 1989, two years before signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. All of this happened in the apartheid regime’s dying days, before its complete collapse in 1994.

Are these collusions historical bygones? Too long ago to matter today? Certainly not, given what’s now underway with regard to U.S policy on Iran.

The key question now is how Washington will act, or react, regarding the Iranian nuclear challenge. To judge from comments by figures in leading U.S. foreign policy circles outside the government, no one in Washington has a clue as to what Tehran intends to do with its nuclear program.

What is apparent, however, is the influence of Israeli fears, or bluster: If Washington doesn’t prevent Iran from getting the bomb, it is assumed, then Israel will.

Even so, Israel’s own nuclear capabilities are almost never discussed. And, quite conveniently, Israel’s record of proliferation is barely known or, rather, swept under the carpet. [Continue reading…]

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The ATF wants ‘massive’ online database to find out who your friends are

Wired reports: The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.

According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII). The system is intended to operate for at least five years, and be able to process automated searches of individuals, and “find connection points between two or more individuals” by linking together “structured and unstructured data.”

Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others.

Many other specific requirements are also to be expected for a federal law enforcement agency: searching names, phone numbers, “nationwide utility data” and reverse phone searches. The data will then be collected to help out during investigations and provide “relevant information and intelligence products.” There’s no hint the database is to be used to track gun sales, which is a big part of the ATF’s job, as the bureau is prohibited by law from establishing a centralized electronic database for gun purchases. [Continue reading…]

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War without end: the price of inaction in Syria

Christoph Reuter writes: Western leaders — and German ones, in particular — have come up with countless reasons for not providing military support to Syrian rebels. But this just plays into the hands of Assad, who has nothing to win, but plenty to destroy.

Take a moment to imagine it the other way around: A Syrian dictator with a full beard — an Islamist harboring al-Qaida sympathies — has the Christian population of his country shot, starved and bombed, lets fanatical militias massacre non-believers and burns the country down to ashes. Were that the case, an alliance of Western nations would step up to intervene faster than you could say “Mali.”

Yet the people of Syria have been trying to rid themselves of a dictator for two years now. They spent months getting shot at while participating in peaceful demonstrations before they starting putting up violent resistance, and now they are facing a regime that intends to annihilate them. But it would seem that they’re simply out of luck.

The reason isn’t hard to see: Most of these rebels are Sunnis or, more broadly, Muslims. Many of them also have beards and shout “Allahu akbar” (as do the much smaller numbers of Ismailis, Druzes and Christians who fight alongside them). Sunnis also live in the areas that are being bombed almost daily when visibility is good.

Muslims rising up against their rulers to demand justice simply doesn’t fit into our worldview. Over the past decades, this view has been fed on news of the Taliban, of radical Islamist clerics preaching messages of hate, of “honor” killings, of battles over a Danish cartoon and of the events of 9/11. Held responsible for the sum total of all we have heard over the years, Syria’s Muslims are finding that the world views their struggle with suspicion and as just another attempt to establish a Muslim theocracy.

If they were Tibetans, you could bet things would be different. But, as is, Bashar Assad’s air force has been allowed to bomb with impunity. Scud missiles level entire city blocks, while Syria gradually empties out. Over 70,000 people have died in the conflict, and more than 1 million have fled the country. [Continue reading…]

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The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing

Amira Hass writes: Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including 8-year-old children, is an inseparable part − though it’s not always spelled out − of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement, and the unequal distribution of water sources.

The violence of 19-year-old soldiers, their 45-year-old commanders, and the bureaucrats, jurists and lawyers is dictated by reality. Their job is to protect the fruits of violence instilled in foreign occupation − resources, profits, power and privileges.

Steadfastness (Sumud) and resistance against the physical, and even more so the systemic, institutionalized violence, is the core sentence in the inner syntax of Palestinians in this land. This is reflected every day, every hour, every moment, without pause. Unfortunately, this is true not only in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, but also within Israel’s recognized borders, although the violence and the resistance to it are expressed differently. But on both sides of the Green Line, the levels of distress, suffocation, bitterness, anxiety and wrath are continually on the rise, as is the astonishment at Israelis’ blindness in believing that their violence can remain in control forever.

Often hurling stones is borne of boredom, excessive hormones, mimicry, boastfulness and competition. But in the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of “We’ve had enough of you, occupiers.”

After all, teenagers could find other ways to give vent to their hormones without risking arrests, fines, injuries and death.

Even if it is a right and duty, various forms of steadfastness and resisting the foreign regime, as well as its rules and limitations, should be taught and developed. Limitations could include the distinction between civilians and those who carry arms, between children and those in uniform, as well as the failures and narrowness of using weapons.

It would make sense for Palestinian schools to introduce basic classes in resistance: how to build multiple “tower and stockade” villages in Area C; how to behave when army troops enter your homes; comparing different struggles against colonialism in different countries; how to use a video camera to document the violence of the regime’s representatives; methods to exhaust the military system and its representatives; a weekly day of work in the lands beyond the separation barrier; how to remember identifying details of soldiers who flung you handcuffed to the floor of the jeep, in order to submit a complaint; the rights of detainees and how to insist on them in real time; how to overcome fear of interrogators; and mass efforts to realize the right of movement. Come to think of it, Palestinian adults could also make use of these lessons, perhaps in place of their drills, training in dispersing protests, and practice in spying on Facebook posts.

When high school students were drafted two years ago for the campaign of boycotting settlement products, it seemed like a move in the right direction. But it stopped there, without going further, without broadening the context. Such lessons would have been perfectly in tune with the tactics of appealing to the United Nations − civil disobedience on the ground and defiance of power in diplomacy.

So why are such classes absent from the Palestinian curriculum? Part of the explanation lies with the opposition of the donor states and Israel’s punitive measures. But it is also due to inertia, laziness, flawed reasoning, misunderstanding and the personal gains of some parts of society. In fact the rationale for the existence of the Palestinian Authority engendered one basic rule in the last two decades − adaptation to the existing situation. Thus, a contradiction and a clash have been created between the inner syntax of the Palestinian Authority and that of the Palestinian people.

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